The Magic Hour: Rehearsal 1

Now that we have our director and actors, we booked ourselves a rehearsal slot at ARC Stockton to try out our fledgling script on the actual stage where we’ll be Scratching on Wednesday 11th September – and performing in full on Saturday 7th December! (Tickets are now on sale for the Arc Scratch Night, book yours on the ARC website now!)

It’s always a good sign to see your director this happy, we think! We sent our actors Jonny Bussell and David Robson off to a dark corner to work some of their own magic on one of our scenes, and they came back with a hilarious reinterpretation that involved a whole load of gymnastics and ham accentry. Helen and our actors Scarlett Pink, Victoria Holtom, Jonny and David are all fantastic at finding the comedy in our scripts and bringing it to the fore – as evidenced by David’s top notch ‘dramatic pause acting’ below (brilliant mirroring of his own t-shirt too!). We were trying out a mixture of different scenes and scenarios that had emerged from both our own Meerkat Development Days and the previous week’s workshop. We have lots of pieces – now it’s about finding an order in which to present them, and creating a central narrative that ties all the elements of the performance together.

Victoria is playing the part of our central character, the mysteriously named ‘Blue Shoes’. She’s had a bit too much of Christmas this year and is trying to escape – but that pesky festive spirit just keeps coming back to get her!

At the start of the night we had an Argos Dad having a traumatic experience in a superstore queue, and by the end he had fractured into three distinct personalities. Meet Bill, Geoff and Gary: three iterations of an all-too-familiar Christmas meltdown.

There are lots of different voices speaking up throughout our show, and we played around with who those voices might belong to and how they might interact with each other. Each of our actors brought something different to each scene, and it was interesting to try out different combinations and see how the performances would alter the mood of a scene.

Pleased to say that we were all still laughing by the end of our first rehearsal, which can only be a good thing right? The Meerkats are now getting ready for our Scratch performance on the 11th. There’s another rehearsal to squeeze in before then, and a lot of paperwork and planning going on behind the scenes – so look out for more blog posts and photos from our Magic Hour development process coming soon.